Poll_Blind

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Member since: 2003 before July 6thNumber of posts: 23,863

About Me

NOTE: Anyone can join Democratic Underground. They can claim anything. Democratic Underground gives no warranty that the people with which you interact on Democratic Underground are Democrats or even Progressives. They may be Republicans, other political agitators or merely the mentally-unstable, heavily intoxicated or deranged personalities whose behavior is best described as "shit-stirring assholes". Furthermore, reading the first two sentences again, realize that their irrational, inflammatory or destructive behavior may appear to be supported by other individuals or even the bulk of respondents to a given post. However, always applying the above paragraph to certain phantasmagoric situations you may witness in given threads in our fora, you are best served by believing only those ideas that you agree with to be real and the rest, highly suspect.

From the moment I heard about something they described as "Web 2.0", I made a promise to myself that I'd never register on those sites. At the time the biggest thing was something called "Friendster". Anyway, amazingly, I was able to keep my promise. I've only had one Facebook account, under an assumed name, with which I communicate with my son- which is rarely because we live in the same town.

If you type my name into a search engine you get nothing or inaccurate information. Amusingly (and a stroke of luck) my name is actually the name of a semi-famous person in a certain field and so, if anything, it brings up them. If you know my name and type it into Intellius and pay the $50 (or whatever it is, now) I come back clean.

If you're the government, you can find me in a heartbeat. As it should be, of course.

If not...even with my name...good luck!

I fucking can't express how much I love that. Many years ago I got into computational linguistics, mostly for authorship attribution purposes. You think companies have The Snoop on ya? You have no idea.

Burn your Facebook accounts, get rid of all that social media shit. I've had to listen to otherwise intelligent, educated, articulate people complain like sophomores in highschool over endless Facebook/Twitter/Social Media kerfuffles.

"I hate that! And then they unfriended me. And so I unfriended them back. You know?" they ask.

"No, sorry. I don't." and a smile. I used to practically jack off to cyberpunk when I was a kid. It was a kind of unimaginable freedom. This cyberpunk learned a long time ago that meatspace has many, many more places to hide.

The promises of omniscience of the cyber world. Slinking among the cathedrals of data, flitting like an angel through a satellite with a list of protocols like a riverboat gambler's deck of cards... All of that is nothing to the useful information you can learn from a bored city employee, a coffee shop barrista in the old section of town, a cashier who's fighting with the underwire in her failing brassiere in a Mexican bakery.

Some people like to go for drives in the country and some people like to go for drives in tornado country. And then into the tornados, because.

So you can't do it in just any old car of course. No, you need something pretty amazing to drive into a tornado and survive and that's just what stormchasers Brandon Ivey and Sean Casey built. They call it the TIV 2. Here's a snippet from Mythbusters where Adam and Jamie geek out over the features of the TIV 2:

On that episode of Mythbusters they tested the TIV 2 out and it passed their simulated tornado, which was accomplished by putting it behind the roaring engines of a jumbo jet.

But how does it handle itself in a real tornado? Like a boss, that's how. Uploaded to YouTube yesterday:

...puzzles many, irritates some, and entirely alienates a few of his base.

Not an atypical political maneuver. This is politics. You play that card when you have to because it's most definitely not a "Get Out of Jail FREE" card. It has consequences on the base although, from my example, it usually isn't the end of the world. However, the frequency with which the President plays this card lessens his credibility and the credibility of the Democratic party, overall.

With 2014 coming up I have yet to see a Democratic politician who is still openly embracing the actual policies of the President and some commentary that Democratic House members are going to have to distance themselves from the President's policies in order to get the best turnout.

So I just think, not only is the President not frequently moving a left-wing agenda forward, he's not helping get those votes out for (especially) Democratic House reps, where we need that control the most.

His "Give the cold shoulder to Democrats while courting Republicans in hopes of winning them over" maneuver has failed, failed, failed. The man is locked in an untenable position, trying the same losing ideas over and over and fucking over again. The Barack Obama of 2008 before the election had vision. And during the campaign in 2012, for instance, on Afghanistan, the President has a similar "resurgance" of vision.

He led himself into lame-duck-hood since about 2010 and somehow just decided that he was going to keep doing the same things which weren't working and expecting a different result. His most ardent supporters are frequently reduced to simply trying to pass off the office of the President as being essentially helpless, a daisy head of good intentions blown to the wind. Which, I suppose, would have been convincing had America not suffered through the effective (for the Republicans) Bush years and how high that effectiveness was, even with Democrats controlling both the House and the Senate.

Again, the need to downplay the importance of the Presidency is the single biggest indicator that the President, although genuinely beset by an awful legislative impedance by Republicans (and even sometimes Democrats), has also failed on a deeper level.

I'd love to read a book about why we're so fucking insecure and touchy about our own patriotism and have to shellack ourselves with flag pins and shit like that. There's just a whiff of the closeted gay male persecuting others for their homosexuality.

As interesting (and disturbing) as the phenomena is in the context of sexuality, you have to fucking wonder what dark motherfucking shit is behind the "patriotic" version of the same behavior.

Ooh, that's really disturbing, actually. I wonder if anyone has written anything on that topic. (?)

...about ethical aspects of a person. I grew up in New Orleans and while it's true that some people may construe "ladylike" or "gentlemanly" with heavy gender inflection, in practice it was used (where I lived, anyway) to denote a person's comportment, quality of speech, behavior in regards to ethical matters and so on.

The particular place where I grew up had scads and scads of poor people and there was a lot of classism and racism. However a wealthy white man or woman could still be described as "ungentlemanly" or "unladylike" and even the poorest black person could still be described as "gentlemanly" or "ladylike", depending on their actual behavior.

It was a sort of class-related modifier and it was used to at least partially negate a person's economic class status (wealthy or not) to indicate what kind of person they actually were.

When I moved to Oregon I found there really wasn't much in the way of a distinction which was used to modify class like this. In many ways there is more of a rigid stratification up here based on economic class than there was down in New Orleans. Which is really too bad because the concept of a wealthy person being, by default, honorable, is not necessarily true. The only time I would hear any of those words would be girls or ladies sarcastically ribbing each other after, say, a belch, and laughing and accusing their friend of being "unladylike" before belching themselves.

And that's fine. And that's probably how most people, especially in North, view those words.

But the way it was used where I was born, there was a great deal more subtlety to the meaning of those words.

...wonder and nostalgia by eyes not formed yet, pondered by minds yet to twinkle into existence. Oh, and how future hands will caress the vidscreen in a yearning to be in the treasured, simpler, mundanity of our now.

"What would it have been like to meet these people?" they will say of us.